Dr. Daniel Bennett, Director of Center for Faith and Flourishing
Dr. Daniel Bennett is an expert on the intersection of law, politics, and religion in the United States. He is the author of Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement, and has written academic articles and book chapters on political behavior, legal advocacy, and the federal courts. He has been interviewed about his research in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Associated Press, among others.
In addition to his academic writing, Dr. Bennett has also written for The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, Religion and Politics, The Monkey Cage, and Front Porch Republic. He is a founding contributor to the blog Religion in Public and also regularly blogs at Uneasy Citizenship. He is serving a two-year term as president of Christians in Political Science.
Dr. Trisha Posey, Center for Faith and Flourishing Faculty Fellow
Dr. Trisha Posey is the director of the Honors Scholars Program at John Brown University. Her primary academic interest is in the relationship between religion and reform in the 19th-century United States. She has also studied the history of slavery in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of racism left by slavery. Her other areas of academic interest include African history, the history of poverty and welfare, and genocide. She is currently working on an edited volume of essays on the relationship between lament and history. Dr. Posey earned her Ph.D. in American History at the University of Maryland. Before that, she lived in Canterbury, England, where she finished her M.Phil. She received a B.A. in History from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. Dr. Posey lives in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, with her husband, Jake, her three children, Eliot, Oliver and Beatrice. She enjoys cooking and eating good food, reading, running, knitting, gardening, and thinking and writing about the intersections of history and modern justice movements.
Dr. Preston Jones, Center for Faith and Flourishing Affiliated Fellow
Preston Jones seeks to connect the insights of great religious and philosophical texts to questions of ordinary life. The teachings of Aristotle, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, and the Buddha differ greatly, but they have themes in common. In his Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis referred to these common teachings as The Tao. Lives cannot be good without wisdom, and wisdom cannot be acquired without reflection on, and a persevering response to, the requirements of The Tao.
After four years in the U.S. Navy, Preston finished graduate school at the University of Ottawa in Canada. In 2000–2003, he helped start a still-going preparatory high school in Dallas. Since then he has taught at the university level. He has published eight books, dozens of scholarly articles, and more than a hundred op-eds, essays, and reviews. Each day he reads in Spanish, French, and Vietnamese.
Preston has interviewed hundreds of combat veterans, and he has an ongoing collborative relationship with the Jonestown Institute based at San Diego State University. He has also done interviewing on behalf ofthe U.S. Department of Defense.
Preston has run 55 marathons and his favorite album in 1981, when he was in the 8th grade, is still his favorite album: Seconds Out by Genesis.